THE ATLANTIC: Did Bloggers Kill The Healthcare Mandate?

Blogs — particularly a blog of big legal ideas called Volokh Conspiracy — have been central to shifting the conversation about the mandate challenges. At Volokh, Barnett and other libertarian academics have been debating and refining their arguments against the mandate since before the ACA was signed. At the beginning, law professor Jonathan Adler fleshed out the approach that came to typify the elite conservative response for the first months of the public debate: the Founders never intended for the Constitution to permit such broad federal power, but given New Deal-era precedent, the mandate, if it became law, would pass muster. Things changed on Volokh around the time that it became clear that an insurance mandate would be part of whichever health care reform package passed into law.

The blog that saved America? Hey, someone should write a book about this kind of thing.

Also, Ilya Somin weighs in. “Where we did have some influence is in debunking the myth that the constitutionality of the mandate was a no-brainer backed by an overwhelming consensus of expert opinion. But we could not have done that were we not 1) recognized academic experts on these issues ourselves, and 2) able to point to other well-known experts who also believed the mandate to be unconstitutional, many of them not VC-ers. The latter include such prominent constitutional law scholars as Richard Epstein, Steve Calabresi, Steve Presser, and Gary Lawson.”

UPDATE: Reader Michael Formica writes:

Is it really the case, as the Atlantic claims, that Volokh actually changed perceptions? Or is it simply a case of clueless myopic liberals (but I repeat myself) blathering on in their journolista echo chamber parroting whatever Ezra Klein/Andrew Sullivan and the Obama PR machine (but I repeat myself) told them to say in their fetish to support whatever it is Obama and the liberal left desire.

I mean seriously, the Atlantic cites some crackpot liberals blog post about the inevitability of Rule 11 sanctions for seeking to challenge federal legislation as an example of intelligent critical thinking on the lunacy of challenging Obamacare?? That ranks right up there with Pelosi’s thinking.

It opened up a preference cascade, overcoming the bullying tactics of ObamaCare supporters.